She remains, though, oppressively alert. The damp elastic of her tube top constricts her chest. Sweat beads on her eyelids, under her bottom lip, in the shallow cleft between her breasts. Each drop of perspiration is separate and distinct on her face like a bead of mercury, and the sensation makes her dizzy, like she’s underwater with no sense of up or down. Which way means air? She’ll lie here till her father comes out for the morning paper and she’ll accept his punishment; he is not imaginative. She squeezes her hands together, squeezes her crotch till it hurts, hating the chemical she swallowed that raised her up high and splendid but won’t drop her completely back down.
She’ll fall asleep, she tells herself, if she stops trying to sleep, so she tries not to try. Something bites the back of her neck. A bad-tasting juice rises in her throat and she swallows, hating her mother, useless in her sedated sleep. She could maybe pound on the door loud enough to wake her father, who sleeps downstairs in the den. Who’ll be less angry now than tomorrow morning when he sees her empty room.
Then comes the shade of Garth, a seeming murmur in her ear: Try me. I’ll let you in, sister. Her teeth start to chatter. She could knock on the basement window, which is right over his bed. Why not? Hell is absurd, hell is nothing to her, a nasty fable to scare the children. But the thought of her brother fills her with shame and self-disgust. Please, Mom, she says in her mind, do something for once! Although the only evidence of her mother’s strength of character was her refusal to abort her, a decision she made against the wishes of the good-looking asshole who was scared enough of his own father and the pain of hellfire to marry her. She was a sophomore in high school. Vera closes her eyes as if to shut out the image of her mother young and hopeful, and the concrete seems to shift beneath her. She can’t countenance hell, but limbo makes sense, a floaty place between lost and found, evil and good. She wants to throw up, though there’s nothing in her stomach. Oh, to lie under covers, under the weight of something.
On the next block a dog starts to bark, then two more, a chorus of need and desire: Chain’s too short, collar’s too tight. Get me out of here. Pet me. She’s dizzily awash in the harsh, lonely sounds, and then, with no sense of having arisen, she’s descending the steps. On flat ground she puts her heels together. Fingers curved softly, she raises her hands over her head and sways in the wind, in the damp starry night. She’s a feather in the acid aftermath, a husk, so wasted that a harder gust might waft her away. And then she’s wafting, around the house to where a rhomboid of electric light shines on the side lawn. Through the low, narrow window comes the muted wail of an electric guitar: “Purple Haze,” and Garth trying to kiss the sky. Garth, the white Jimi Hendrix. Garth bemoans his singing voice, which is too sweet for the music of rage and pain, but Vera has always loved it.
She stands above the window but doesn’t rap on the glass. What passed between them fills her even in memory with a searing terror, as if her brain is being tweezed from her skull through her eyeballs. Making love with him seemed simple and pure, beyond pleasure, an expression of their deepest selves. She felt whole—at one with him, the world, and herself, as if there was nothing more to strive for, a state of mind she seemed to have wanted all her life without ever believing it possible. But afterward, almost immediately, she was mired in shame. As high as she had been, she was struck low, obliterated, mind and soul, banished from the world of goodness and ordinariness like Lucifer after his rebellion, banned from the sight of God. Not that she believes in God. She drops to her knees, expels a thin, bitter liquid.
Back on the porch she sits on a middle step, leaning against a riser, eyes wide in the dizzy heights above sleep. A mosquito whines in her ear. She lights her last cigarette. She tends not to mind bug bites; normally her skin resists sensation, as if it weren’t skin at all but an elastic, flesh-colored sheath. She runs her fingers along her arm, the small, hard swellings. Inside her elbow a latent itch flares, then one on her anklebone, and more: on the small of her back, the back of her neck, the soft skin over her eye. She turns quiet inside with the desire to scratch, resisting at first, then submitting as she sometimes submits to sex, voracious and jubilant. Her fingers are clawed, she is about to scratch, when the porch light snaps on. The screen door swings open. “Get yourself in the goddamned house.”
She’s inside before the sentence concludes, standing at attention on the hall rug while her father inspects her. “You got yourself beat up.” He sounds concerned, but that’s how it starts. “Well, what’s the story?”
“I ran into a door?” The smart-assery comes out too fast to be checked; she lets it flow. “It could have been a tree?” What will be will be. A laugh tickles the back of her throat. “Sorry.”
“That bastard Mick,” he says. “That slimebag.”
All residue of the drug is gone. She’s in a play in which she knows all the lines. “It wasn’t Saint, Daddy.” She exaggerates the girlish breathiness of the underling, the powerless one. He touches her cheek softly.
“I’m going to kill him.”
Tears spring to her eyes, although they don’t seem to have come from anywhere inside her. She stands motionless under her father’s oddly gentle touch, gazing at the wooden crucifix on the wall behind him. Tucked behind it is the dried, frayed stalk of a palm. Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee. Her voice almost breaks: “You don’t know him, Dad. He’s a nice guy. Really. I’m the crazy one.” Then, embarrassed by her unwilled earnestness, she tilts her head up, displaying her eye in all its damaged glory. Her father’s mouth tightens, but he makes no other move. He’s controlling himself. “It was some tourist creep. A piece of male shit.” She smiles wickedly. “I may have provoked him.”
He takes her by her bare shoulders and she feels what he’s feeling: her tiny bones in his hands like chicken bones. But he is in command of himself. This too she can sense. He took a course in impulse control at the police academy.
“Are you,” she says, “disappointed in me?” He takes a breath, looks into her eyes as if he’s trying to understand something. “Let me have it, Dad. Show me who’s boss.”
“Why should I waste energy on a girl without a smack of decency or sense?”
“A girl who opens her legs to every dick in the neighborhood?” This is his line. She smiles demurely.
“Look at yourself!” he says. “Where’s your self-respect?” His eyes traverse her breasts under her tube top, the span of naked flesh above her cutoffs. He wants to slap her; it’s coming. “Don’t think this is over.”
She shrugs, then sticks her hands into her pockets like someone who hasn’t a care in the world, and encounters the folded Pledge. A shiver of triumph courses through her. In her ferocious, sustained battle with her father, victory is almost certain. “Let’s hope not,” she murmurs, almost loud enough for him to hear on the way to his bed in the den.
—
As a little girl, Vera loved her father the way a religious person was supposed to love God. On his nights off, after dinner, they’d sit on the TV room couch watching gangster movies. She liked Edward G. Robinson’s pebbled skin, his barrel chest like her father’s, his gritty snarl of a voice: “Ya want me ta mess up that pretty face a yours for good?” She’d mimic it to her father, who would reply, “You’re going to be trouble, angel!” as if he admired her burgeoning willfulness. To her malformed hand he gave no special attention, and neither did she. His opinions were her opinions. She felt safe with her father, who was stronger than other kids’ fathers, armed with all the paraphernalia of protection—the belt that held his nightstick and gun, the sweeping light on top of his car, the righteous rage of his siren. Her mother, who was back then strong enough to get an idea and carry it out, had enrolled her in ballet class on Saturday mornings, and sometimes her father would pick her up in a police car. Once, waiting in that car in a parking lot while he was inside a store, she slid into the deeper warmth of the driver’s part of the front seat, pushed a button on the steering wheel, and the siren went off, l
ike a wild animal raging around the car. When her father leaned in and turned it off, she was sobbing with panic. He said, then had to repeat, “Which hand was responsible?”
Of course he was going to punish her. It was so right and certain that she had already extended to him the hand that had pushed the button—her small hand, which was also her dominant hand, the first volunteer for any manual task. Her head was raised bravely, her shoulders hunched for the blow. He had hit her before, and she never thought to protest; if he’d chopped off the offending part, she’d have borne it bravely. But this time he only tapped her hand. “Never again, right?” he said, then kissed it, her runt of a hand that didn’t know its place, and in her heart there was no doubt: She was in love with her father, who could punish or forgive at will like God.
Throughout grade school, as her mother relinquished her maternal duties one by one, her father assumed them. On Sunday mornings he took her and Garth to Mass and sat between them, sometimes holding her hand. He would pick her up from school and take her to a friend’s house or to Woolworth’s for a Coke. She was the most important person in his life, it was clear to her, and he in hers.
Then, in sixth grade, a new girl started at Immaculata, a girl with shiny dark hair who couldn’t stop talking about Vera’s hand. Having seen it all their lives, Vera’s classmates were used to her defect. It was a fact; why mention it? But this girl, whose name—Bonnie Thibodot—even now stirs Vera’s rage (though Bonnie Thibodot left Lourdes for a school in Hong Kong the following year and was lost to history), took a look at the hand at the end of Vera’s right arm and cried, “Ee-ew, like a fetus!” for everyone to hear, and Vera understood then that one single person can change everything. Although no one in her class knew what a fetus looked like, they were suddenly sickened, these girls Vera had played with on the playground, who had come to her house after school. They tried not to look at her hand, and the effort made them squeal with laughter. They looked through their fingers, gasping with hilarity. This is how it will be, she thought, for the rest of my life.
She didn’t take it meekly. She pulled Bonnie’s shiny dark hair, she scratched her face. So it was Vera who was restrained, lectured, threatened with suspension. Not the sort to ask adults for help, Vera bore their disapproval in proud silence. But silently she was engorged with rage, a lens through which she now saw the world and herself. In ballet she had been a star, the soloist at recitals, but after that she couldn’t raise her small hand over her head without thinking of Bonnie. In ballet class several months later, she landed on the side of her foot and broke her ankle, and quit lessons for good, although the ankle healed. “I never wanted to dance,” she told her mother. “Why did you make me?”
She wanted to quit Immaculata too. But, required to finish out the year before she could start at the public junior high school, she reworked her personality to meet the new circumstances. Formerly courteous and diligent, she started mouthing off to the nuns. She spurned her former friends, even the ones who made small overtures of apology, pointing out their errors and physical flaws, which were suddenly crystal clear to Vera’s eyes—a broad nose, gaping nostrils, creased neck, pocked cheek. A lisp. A stupid answer in class. At home she refused to do chores. “I must protect my beauty-hands,” she’d say in an exaggerated Southern accent. She’d make Garth cry, especially when her father was in the house, just to see what he’d do. Sometimes she still felt love for her father, profound love, but she was compelled to taunt him. Once he grabbed her in frustration and she stuck out her tongue at him. He slapped her then, and it seemed to her that this was what she was waiting for, the bright flicker of pain in her cheek. Soon punishments became regular—after which she’d dissolve into abject tears and throw her arms around her father, obliterate herself before his greater strength and knowledge. But still, the next time and the next, her will pranced out to meet his, David smart-assing Goliath, a half-grown dog teasing a bear.
—
Left alone in the hallway, Vera doesn’t know what to do next. She drags herself to the foot of the stairway, which is solidly built and will make no sound under her weight. She stands with her hand on the banister. The stairs to her room are steep and there are so many of them. Who is Vera, she thinks, this wisp of a body, these thoughts that pass so fast she can’t remember any of them?
Then with no movement of hers that she can remember, utterly without volition, she is standing at the door that leads down to the basement, two painted cinder-block rooms and the laundry, the space Garth made his private headquarters after returning from Florida. She touches the door lightly with the flat of her hand, a symbolic “good night” to her brother. But the thick wood actually throbs under her hand. She turns the knob. The lights are off, but a roll, from drums and a bass guitar, comes at her like a wall of water. Trumpets. Garth is listening to Revolver, turned up so high the darkness is thrumming.
When her eyes adjust, she tiptoes down and makes her way past the room with the ping-pong table to the second room, which doesn’t have a door. The bed is empty; at first the room seems empty. Then, on the far side of Garth’s bed, she sees a candle burning low and her brother asleep on his little rug. His T-shirt has ridden up, his ribs are fish-bone long and fragile; she sees the shadows between them. She loves the base of his spine where his jeans bag out. His back, as lean as her own. Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Perhaps there is a hell, she thinks, hell and heaven, downstairs and up. She chooses heaven, though she doesn’t believe in it, walking quickly up the linoleum stairs, glad for the torrent of sound that hides her footfalls.
In the bathroom across from her bedroom she showers with the hottest water she can stand, rubbing herself hard with a stiff washcloth; she brushes her teeth till her gums sting and puts on a pair of her old flannel pajamas. But ready for bed, she isn’t ready to sleep yet, and it’s as if she never will be. She finds her old toe shoes and pas de bourrées over the carpet in her room, her long hair dripping. The house is so sturdy the floor doesn’t shake. She does changements till her heart is racing, cushioning her landings with softly bent knees. Then the door swings open. “Dad, get out of here!” But it’s not her father. “Oh shit. Shit!”
Garth leans against her doorframe, straight, tall, and leggy-thin, like a plant seeking light. His shoulders are just starting to broaden. His jeans hang on his hips. Her heart swings wildly under her breastbone. “Go away. Please, Garth.”
“I just got here!” He clucks. “Come on, give me a break. Hey, what’s with the eye?”
Pat-patting the floor in her toe shoes, she walks to the window, turns the fan on, then off. She presses her hands to the fabric of her pajamas, the bones of her chest. She sits down on her bed, stands up, sits. “Jesus! Do you have to burst in on me?”
“I learned it from you.” He looks hard at her face. “Did Dad do that?” He gazes gravely, absorbing all her displeasure with him. He has wonderful posture. Even as a child he had the straight back of a soldier. He says, “I’ll report him. I will. He can’t do that to you.”
“Who will you report him to?” When he says nothing, she shrugs. “It wasn’t Dad, it was some hillbilly type. You should see what he looks like.”
His brow knits as he absorbs the new information. “Why do you always get in trouble like that?”
She scowls and he turns away. For a moment she wonders if he’ll start to cry. As a little kid he sometimes cried for no reason she could fathom, but he hasn’t cried in years. Mr. Cool now, he struts to her nightstand, turns on the radio.
“Hssh, Garth, you’ll wake Mom.”
“Want to bet?”
His face, though, isn’t angry or mocking. He sits down on the floor at the foot of her bed, maintaining his perfect posture. He has eerily white-blond hair like hers but his teeth don’t need braces. Hers could have used them, though she refused. She clicks off the radio, sits, and takes off her pink shoes. He picks one of them up, puts
it to his cheek. He runs the satin along his lower lip. “I remember you dancing.”
She keeps her face neutral, remembering him in grade school, how quiet he was. Garth is very bright but he should contribute more to class discussion, teachers would say, but even then he had presence. Friends would call him all the time and invite him over, boys and girls both. She stands up, motioning for him to stand as well. “Goodbye, Garth.” She cocks her head toward the door. “Adieu, mon frère. Dors bien. I’m getting into bed.”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
She shakes her head firmly. “It happened once. It will never happen again. Don’t give me any shit about free love.”
“I’m not sure you know, Vera, that you are a very beautiful woman.”
“Quit that!” Stationed at the head of her bed, longing to lie down, she regards him sternly but he won’t look away. Eyes on her face, he crawls to her and takes hold of her ankles. Runs a hand up her calf to the back of her knee. The tiny hairs of her legs stand on end. She whispers, “Don’t you feel the least bit weird about this?”
He smiles up at her like an intelligent, happy baby. “You know those super-tall swings behind the school? With the chains, that it took forever to pump? If you could get yourself high enough the seat would start jerking, and it was like if you went any farther it would dump you or take you over the top. I’d always chicken out.” He puts a finger in his mouth and bites the corner of a fingernail. He tears it off contemplatively, from one side to the other. “And now it’s like I’ve done it.”
“Good for you.”
“I’ve done it and it’s okay,” he says. “It’s better than okay. It’s what I always wanted.”
Once, in Lourdes Page 9